I really enjoyed my trip to Bucharest – a beautiful, green city, modelled on Paris by Ceauşescu and apparently supporting a strong community of HR professionals (Jason was only joking when he said you were hostile!).

I found it very interesting that 120 HR people would come to find out about web 2.0, and am not sure we would have generated the same level of interest in the UK (not that the interest was in any way unwarranted). I’ve written about this on my latest blogosphere bulletin at HR Zone: ‘Dangers of a tyrannical approach to web 2.0’.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to recommend a former colleague who now works out of Bucharest to anyone who may be after some HR support there: Sinclair Stevenson at Premier Global. Although I’d also be very happy to travel back…

As well as talking about outcomes, and social capital, one of the other important points I made at the HR 2.0 conference was about HR’s accountability for developing social capital.

One of the reasons I think HR fails to be strategic is that it lacks accountability. It’s responsible for designing and supporting a set of activities, but not for actually producing anything. Many HR professionals try to get round this by aiming to take responsibility for a proportion of business results (“this training will result in additional revenue of $x…”). I don’t think they can. There’s just too much of an indirect line between HR activities and the final business results.

As I’ve posted recently, trying to get closer to the business makes HR more proactive, but not actually more strategic.

To be more strategic, HR needs to take accountability. Otherwise, it’s always just going to be a more proactive support function. Not a true driver of competitive advantage.

So one good reason that HR should be excited about the opportunities of HR 2.0 and social capital (as well as HCM and human capital) is that these provide the function with an opportunity to be accountable for something really important to business success.

Organisation capability consists of three separate types of capital (something which is valued by investors in a private sector company):

Human capital is the value which is provided by the people working in an organisation. It’s owned by the people not the organisation, but invested by the people if they receive an appropriate return on their investment. When the people go home at the end of a day’s work, they take their human capital with them.

Organisational capital is the value provided by an organisation’s own business and management structures and processes etc. When people go home, the organisation capital stays in the buildings and technologies of the firm.

Social capital is an emergent property that results through people working in the organisation. It’s a combination of their connections, relationships, and the conversations taking place within the organisation. If the people leave the organisation, it no longer exists within the people or the organisation.

Each of these three different forms of capital need to be developed in different ways. So for example, organisation capital can be developed in fairly mechanistic ways. Human capital needs developing in ways that acknowledges its intangibility, and the complexity between factors. This is why, while you can redesign a process very quickly, it gets time to get people to use the new process in the right way. Social capital is even more complex and intangible. It’s therefore much more difficult to manage than either of the previous two forms.

But it’s also more important. Thinking about this in more traditional, non-capital terms, the point of performance is most organisations is no longer the individual, it’s the team. So the value that will be most important to investors won’t be the human, but the social capital.

Going back to my previous two posts (1 and 2), I’m suggesting that HR 2.0 is defined as the management of people in a way that accumulates social capital (in the same way that HCM accumulates human capital).

Note that social capital is a better outcome to focus on than something like collaboration, because it’s more strategic. As this month’s Harvard Business Review notes, excessive collaboration can reduce rather than increase performance. But, as I mentioned previously, capital refers to something of value to investors in an organisation. Collaboration can be good or bad. Social capital is always good (or or more likely, great) to have.

So how are you managing your people and organisation to accumulate social capital and increase the value of your business?

A fundamental principle behind strategic HR is that we need to focus on outcomes, not activities. Web 2.0 is about activity. It refers to what we do, how we do things, and the technology we use to enable this. It doesn’t deal with the effects of using this technology. Therefore, in my view, it’s not a basis for strategic HR.

(I’m slightly over-stating the case here – there are occasions on which simply improving the use of technology without any further change will result in competitive advantage. But I think these occasions are fairly rare.)

I think this is what we found with e-learning. A major part of the reason why e-learning has failed to live up to the benefits that were initially anticipated is that we focused on e-learning as an activity (requiring us to introduce new e-learning courses) rather than the outcome of having learnt, including electronically, which would have taken us more quickly towards a blended learning approach.

I’ve made the same point in connection to HCM as well. HCM isn’t a more strategic approach than HRM because it involves a different way of operating (although it does). It’s different because it focuses on a new outcome – human capital – which HRM doesn’t include. HCM is therefore qualitatively different to HRM.

I think HR 2.0 needs to be qualitatively different to HRM too. This is what the ‘2.0’ tag is about. If we were talking about a slight shift, an incremental improvement on HRM, we’d be talking about HR 1.1 not 2.0. Or at least some people might be talking about it – I probably wouldn’t bother. I am talking (today, at the Bucharest HR 2.0 conference), and writing (here) about HR 2.0, because I think it is a fundamentally different approach to HRM. And I think this offers new and sizeable opportunities for HR to have more impact on their organisations, and provide a direct impact on competitive success.

(If your want some good arguments to support this case, consult Gary Hamel’s ‘The Future of Management’ in which he shows how management 2.0 is fundamentally different to traditional management still in operation in most of our organisations today.)

This is also why I recently updated the web name of my blog (the name in the top bar of your internet browser: ‘HR to HR 2.0 and human capital (HCM)’, and why I’ve included HR 2.0 in my elevator pitch.

The outcome of HR 2.0, is, I think, social capital. I’ll write further about this link and explain a little more about social capital in my next post.

Today, I’ve flown out to Bucharest to present at a conference on HR 2.0, and this is the also the focus for our next Talking HR show. So, just what is HR 2.0?

One of my co-presenters in Bucharest, Scott McArthur of McArthur’s Rant (on the left of the photo), defines it as creating meaning in the workplace and so promoting organisational and personal excellence. I think that’s pretty good.

The important thing for me is that HR 2.0 is not just HR based on web 2.0 technology / social media, ie blogs, podcasts, wikis etc.

I have the same concern about ‘enterprise 2.0’ which the CIPD report (based on Andrew McAfee’s work) describes as web 2.0 behind an enterprise’s firewall (eg Yammer vs Twitter). To me, enterprise 2.0, or ‘business 2.0’ anyway, is about a new way of working, which can be enabled through the use of web 2.0, but can also be supported through other face-to-face techniques.

This is certainly the case for ‘management 2.0’ which Gary Hamel defines as a new way of operating, which tends to exhibit many of the same attributes as web 2.0, ie being open, inclusive, democratic etc. But the critical thing is that it’s not dependent on web 2.0. The reason these two things are similar is that they are both informed by something else – a change in society (society 2.0?) which is based upon changing expectations, or maybe just increasing assertiveness in ensuring expectations are met, coupled with growing maturity in business and other organisations, which recognises the social needs of the individuals within these organisations.

HR 2.0 to me, is part of this broader change of management 2.0. So in the same way that HR develops the architecture for managers to manage their people, HR 2.0 provides the architecture for management 2.0.

Tuesday, 21 April 2009

On Thursday 14th May, I will be participating in a webinar with Globoforce’s Derek Irvine and Compensation Force’s Ann Bares in a roundtable discussion and Q&A session on the importance of HR during this recession.

Derek will chair the session and talk about Recognition. I will bring my expertise in Human Capital and Talent Management and Ann will join with great insight into Compensation and Benefits. The second half of the presentation will be left open to questions from the audience, so please feel free to submit questions on the registration form, or at any time during the presentation.

Following these ideas will ensure engagement isn’t just a woolly concept but is something that will have a very significant impact on your organisation.

If you’re working in an organisation, I hope you get a chance to explore some of these ideas. And if you want some help, let me know. A quick one-day diagnosis will give you a heads-up on where the opportunities lie, the potential benefits to be obtained from these opportunities, and some suggestions for actions you might want to take to achieve these benefits.

And if you’re based outside of the UK, and during the rest of April and May only, I’m also happy to come to you without charging any travel time. So get in touch…

Sunday, 19 April 2009

Yesterday’s blog challenge was to visit a mall. Huh? Well I hate shopping so I took a couple of hours out of the Smithsonian to visit Earth Day on the National Mall instead. I still didn’t get any good ideas for a blog post though, so I’m going to cheat and refer to Peter Ubel’s reflections on mall-life, described in his book, ‘Free Market Madness’:

“Is there any place where freedom is more apparent than a super market? Walking the aisles of your local grocery store, you can freely choose from among dozens of shampoos, scores of cereals, and hundreds and frozen delicacies.

But are you as free as you think? In some supermarkets today, an anthropologist is wandering the aisles watching how you shop, observing whether your eyes roam the shelves from bottom to top, and measuring how long you linger in front of display cases if you have toddlers in row. Meanwhile, over at the kitchen store, the proprietors have just placed an expensive new cooker onto the shelves, a deluxe model with a control panel that would put a 1990s VCR to shame. At nearly double the price of their next-best model, almost no consumers are willing to buy this new product. But that doesn’t matter to the kitchen store, because the next-best model (which used to be its high-end, slow-selling brand) now races off the shelf, appearing to be a veritable bargain in comparison with this new product.”

Ubel goes on to draw from behavioural economics to show that people's’ search for ‘utility’ (basically, the ) is driven largely by illogical decision making. His main example is the number of people who eat too much and eat the wrong food, reducing the length and quality of their lives, even though they believe they are making a rational choice each time they reach for their next burger.

But (not) protecting our planet is a very good example of failed utility too. Returning to the earth-day theme, each one of us needs to consider our decision making and how these decisions add to, or subtract from, a broader view of utility, which includes preservation of our world. This applies to HR too - see my post on Green HR.

I’ve been using the HCI’s research and attending its webinars etc from its very early days, and have been a professional member for a couple of years. I also attended this year’s Summit in Arizona. I’m attracted by the idea of working with the institute because it has the closest vision to my own in regard to human capital management, and nicely fills the gap in the provision of strategic level knowledge and training that’s still left open by the CIPD, SHRM etc.

If you’re in the UK or Europe, or potentially even in one of the other locations I’ve been working outside the US, and are interested in attending an open HCC / MHCS programme or organising an in-house programme within your organisation, and playing your part in moving to the future of HR, do get in touch (+44 1344 420 512, info [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com).

Saturday, 18 April 2009

Would Paula Jones be a more effective HR business partner if she understood here costs? Absolutely, yes. But she’d still be operating in a support role. She’d probably be a more effective HR operator too as this might give Alan Sugar or her current boss a bit more confidence in her redundancy calculations etc. But is her ability to add up going to inform her organisation’s competitive advantage (or, because it’s in the public sector, it’s ability to meet its strategic goals)? Not one bit.

A lot of what’s written about the future HR deals with becoming more proactive – a better business partner – ie better supporting HR’s business clients to meet their business goals. Even when HR is acting as business player rather than simply a business partner, so it’s truly contributing to business strategy and implementation as an equal to other business execs, I’d argue that it’s still not meeting its potential.

None of this is truly about becoming more strategic. In my books, the only way HR can really become more strategic is to contribute directly to competitive advantage through its own activities, rather than by how these activities support the business to achieve its existing business goals. And the way it does this is by thinking about activities in terms of the outcomes these produce and that HR can control – including human capital (via HCM), and social capital (via HR 2.0).

Simply improving the efficiency or even effectiveness of an HR process (value for money) isn’t being strategic.

Working with the rest of the business to achieve a business outcome (adding value) isn’t being strategic, it’s just being more proactive.

Developing a certain type and level of human capital that’s going to enable the organisation to transform what it’s capable of achieving (creating value) definitely is being strategic. This is the future of HR.

Friday, 17 April 2009

The big question on the mind of the UK’s HR media over the last few weeks has been whether an HR professional could become Sir Alan Sugar's Apprentice? The answer, for Paula Jones at least, is clearly no. I missed the actual episode of the UK’s Apprentice series this week, as I was flying to the US, but what I understand happened, is that despite putting in a generally sound job as project manager, and developing and selling her product, Paula made a rather unfortunate mix up in its costs. Sir Alan Sugar commented:

"You are a human resources manager - but you can't say you can't do numbers, you can't do this or you can't do that. You know how to work out a redundancy package on a calculator, don't you? You made a fatal mistake. You're fired!"

This need for some basic business acumen is something I haven’t focused on that much on this blog – perhaps not enough? – but then there are plenty of other blogs that do. And I would like to take the opportunity to clarify that just because I don’t post on it, doesn’t mean that I don’t believe it to be true. I absolutely do. Understanding the business, talking the language of business ie Finance, are all absolutely crucial skills for HR. I just don’t think it’s enough, that’s all.

Business acumen will get you so far, but it’s not the difference that will make the difference to the future of HR.

One of the things I really appreciate about travelling around the world as I do is connecting with other bloggers who increasingly make an important part of my social network, even if we’ve never previously met face-to-face.

Tonight, I was privileged to spend a short amount of time with a very talented Washington DC based blogger, and I sure HR Professional, Jessica Lee, author of Jessica Lee Writes; editor of Fistful of Talent and chief promoter of sexy HR.

As well as HR, and other stuff, Jessica writes some great posts on web 2.0, for example her recent posts on jumping into social media (my own thinking on this, by the way, is that HR needs to learn this stuff on a personal basis before involving their organisation – it’s very difficult to communicate the benefits without having experienced them first).

So my advice would be to put up with Jessica’s inability to use the Caps key; read her posts and subscribe to her feeds.

Although the benefits of Web 2.0 tools are becoming clearer for human resources departments, many continue to associate with this technology for social, more personal. Attendees at the event can learn from the most innovative HR professionals how to use Web 2.0 in:

Optimize HR processes

Development of creative processes HR

Performance Management

Talent Management

Employee retention

Training & Development

Recruitment and retention

And especially in crisis management

I’m thrilled to be presenting at this event, partly because I think it’s a really important subject, partly because I really enjoy meeting HR practitioners from different countries, but especially because it’s going to give me the opportunity to meet face-to-face with two stars from my HR social network:

Tuesday, 14 April 2009

It’s DBBB day 9 already, and I’m running behind. Fortunately, day 8’s and day 9’s tasks refer to things I already do anyway.

Day 8 suggested interlinking old blog posts. Now I do link new to old blog posts fairly heavily already, and have started to add some new links to old posts as well. But I’m planning to go through all my posts, checking formats, existing links etc, particularly from the old days when I didn’t really know what I was doing (do I now?), so I’ll incorporate this challenge into that action plan.

Day 9 suggests joining a forum. The challenge includes some good suggestions, and I can definitely make more of the forums I’m already part of, and especially the one that I’ve created!, but I thought the first thing for me to do might be to note down in one place all the open (vs invite only) HR forums / communities I am already part of (harder than it should be as although most of them are ning’s, I use different email addresses, so can’t see them all together). And I thought I should also share this with you.

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Day 3’s task is to promote day 2’s list post. One way of doing this is by commenting on other blogs and forums, and I’ve added a short review on Amazon.com. Another is to add a follow-up post on this same blog. So at the risk of completely overdoing this subject, here’s why - as I say in my Amazon review, and on the Talking HR show – I moderate my criticisms of Becker’s, Huselid’s and Beatty’s book, the Differentiated Workforce, by noting that the authors have asked some important questions that I think all HR practitioners should consider and formulate their own responses to.

These questions include:

1. How is your company going to differentiate your people management strategy from your competitors?

As I posted previously:

“I agree that "most firms don't really have a workforce strategy" and clearly, this is a bit of a problem! I agree that "Despite the tremendous attention in recent years to measuring the financial contribution of HR and talent, there is much less attention to getting the underlying workforce strategy right". I've made this case several times - measures are important, but it's what you do with them that counts.

I also agree with the need to differentiate workforce (or people management) strategy. I like the authors' point: "Just as any good business strategy involves making the right choices and the right investments, the same is true of a workforce strategy", and also Lucien Alziari's comment in the endorsements: "If you read your company's HR strategy, would you be able to tell which company it was written for?". I'm a firm believer that you should be able to do so.”

If ‘people are our most important asset’, it’s not enough to treat this asset just like every other organisation. You need to develop some kind of approach that differentiates you through your people (Becker’s, Huselid’s and Beatty’s Differentiated Workforce is an example of one of these approaches).

2. What do you mean by talent?

In my view, you don’t need to follow any sort of talent management strategy to differentiate your people management strategy. But if you do, and for it to be successful, you need to have a very clear view of what talent in your organisation means, and how if contributes to competitive advantage (Becker’s, Huselid’s and Beatty’s ‘A’ roles, based largely on Boudreau and Ramstad’s pivotal talent, are just one example of such a group).

3. How are you going to navigate through the long value chain that culminates in improved firm performance?

The authors are correct in noting there is a long and indirect causal chain between HR activities, HC outcomes and business results. However, I believe they reach the wrong conclusion from this realisation. As I posted previously:

“The authors seem to disregard the opportunities for creating value by competing on intangibles by explaining that "the line line of sight between workforce strategy and strategic success is typically so indirect that figuring out how to get from here to there is difficult... There are few instances where a selection system, a performance management system, or leadership development has a direct impact on the firm's bottom line, making it hard to see how these decisions translate into strategic success." I agree with the authors here - it is hard. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to do it.”

The right conclusions, in my opinion, are that:

HR needs to concentrate on human capital outcomes rather than just HR activities

These outcomes should be as important to HR as are business results, since these are not directly attributable to HR.

Agreeing with Becker, Huselid and Beatty, strategy maps and scorecards are the best way to understand the relationships between elements in the value chain.

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

The second of Problogger’s 31 day challenges to build a better blog (31DBBB) is to write a list post.

In fact I’ve already just done a top 10 for HR Zone (which although it’s been published today was actually written at the end of last week, ie before the challenge was set), but here’s another. This is my top 10 reasons not to implement a differentiated workforce (at least in the way that it’s described with the Differentiated Workforce book).

I’ve already posted on this book, but only after having read Chapter 1, and there’s a lot more I don’t agree with, having read the whole thing. You can also hear more on a recent Talking HR show, and my interview on HRchitect’s Web Mingle.

So, here’s the list:

1. A differentiated strategy and a differentiated workforce are two different things. I agree that people management strategies should be differentiated, but differentiating the workforce is only one way of providing a differentiated strategy. It’s not a best practice all organisations should implement.

2. Differentiating the workforce in the way the book describes is only ever going to result in added value. Greater opportunities lie in creating value, by, for example, building an organisation’s HR architecture around a particular organisational capability.

3. Differentiating the workforce can be done in lots of different ways. Differentiating by ‘strategic capabilities’ ie core business processes is only one of many options. The authors claim that traditional approaches to talent management are not the answer (p53) – and they do have a point here – but job evaluation isn’t the way most organisations identify their talent groups.

4. It’s not often going to be practical to move ‘A’ players into ‘A’ roles unless these are the ones the players are skilled and qualified to perform. Matching players and roles is about ensuring that over time a higher proportion of the most talented people are working in the most important roles. It’s not necessarily about moving existing employees.

5. ‘A’ roles shouldn’t be the same for all organisations in a sector (p76) – there’s nothing differentiating in this.

6. Deliberately seeking to attract candidates from below the midpoint of the labour market into ‘C’ positions (p104) is a joke. Yes, some organisation has got to employ these people, but there’s no reason that it needs to be you.

7. Forcing a positively skewed performance distribution on ‘A’ positions (p137) is an even bigger joke. Yes, you want more talented people in more important roles but you want higher performance from them too. You set more demanding expectations, and still work towards a normal distribution curve.

8. Holding both line managers and HR accountable for the development of a successful workforce (p88) goes against on of the fundamental principles of good organisation design – to only ever hold one person accountable (RACI analysis). For me, it’s HR that needs to be accountable for the outcome – which could be the right match of ‘A’ players in ‘A roles’, and business leaders accountable with what they do with that.

9. Being an employer of choice (vs employee of choice) doesn’t need to mean what they describe it as (p113) – see this post.

10. The HR scorecard, Workforce scorecard and the author’s adaptation of Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Business scorecard (p156) make sense as a framework for objective setting and measurement at a high-level, but the perspectives within the first two of these simply don’t make sense as they’re not part of a strategy map (p169) – better use the HCM value chain.

This is the question asked by Human Resources this month. Peter Hutton, a former deputy MD at MORI, and author of 'What Are Your Staff Trying To Tell You’ challenges the worth of engagement surveys, explaining that “no one has decided what engagement is and surveys don't ask what bosses want their staff to be engaged with. It's so woolly."

I think Hutton makes a good point (and have proposed some solutions to it in my last post). However, I don’t agree that surveys are therefore a waste of time. The type of surveys I’ve described are certainly very valuable, but I think even the less well developed surveys, including Gallup’s Q12, and Best Companies (both of which are criticised by Hutton), add a lot of value too.

The key point is that few business are very good at engaging their people, and that this has a serious impact on their performance. As Mike Emmott at the CIPD explains:

“More and more employers now see employee engagement as an essential tool to drive improved performance at both individual and organisational levels. Research suggests that there is significant room for improvement . The unfortunate fact is that most UK employees are not engaged and fewer still highly engaged and unless this issue is squarely addressed organisations will continue to under-perform.

“The focus now needs to be on how engagement levels can be improved and how the barriers to engagement identified in the report can be overcome”.

I think until this situation is corrected, engagement surveys will continue to play a very important role in HR’s and business leaders’ lives. I also think they’re particularly important right now. Employees may be more ‘transactionally engaged’ that they were a year ago due to the fear of loosing their job. But I think they are also likely to less ‘passionately engaged’, ie truly committed to their organisations. Well designed engagement surveys can help organisations understand how they can turn this passion back on.

Putting people (human capital) first – creating value through people management

Facilitating peoples’ relationships and conversations (social capital) - including through the use of socialmedia (HR 2.0).”

The blog’s aim is to help you develop more strategic approaches, and therefore to have more impact on your business.”

You may have noticed that in line with this statement, I’ve recently changed the web title of this blog to ‘HR to HR 2.0 and human capital (HCM)’. However, I’m still keeping the blog’s nominal title, and web address, as Strategic HCM.

One of my recent posts described engagement as a categorisation, or a bucket. It will consist of a number of ‘outcomes’ describing the result of an organisation’s management on its people, moderated by the way each employee reacts to this type of management. This will include things like retention, advocacy, pride etc.

Unfortunately, it seems MacLeod is mainly looking for key words, values or slogans, which I suspect won’t help provide any further clarity.

Why does it matter? (i.e. how robust is the evidence that correlates higher levels of employee engagement with organisational performance?)

Engagement has an important role as a key aspect of human capital, being informed by the way an organisation manages its people, and itself informing business results (ie changes in processes, customer satisfaction and financial results etc). It therefore moves beyond seeing people as a resource to be used to support a business in meeting its objectives (although this is still included too), to a form of capital, which can help set new or more challenging business goals.

Few pieces of research are robust in themselves, but put them together and the argument is very compelling.

What does it look like and what enables it?

It looks different from organisation to organisation. To some extent, each company needs to define engagement for itself, based upon what it sees as important, ie, what is it engaging its people to?

Obviously the activities which enable engagement are also dependent upon the way that engagement is defined.

Why does it not happen (i.e. what are the barriers to employee engagement)?

One of the problems is business leaders and HR leaders thinking that the approach I’ve described is too difficult (it’s not that difficult!), and settling for the definition given to them by their survey provider.

What should the review recommend should be done to enhance levels of engagement?

* The MacLeod review, announced in September 2008, is being conducted for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform by David MacLeod, working with Nita Clarke from the IPA. Its purpose is to deal with the fact that only around 12% of the UK workforce can be considered as highly engaged by developing a better understanding of what drives some businesses to engage with their workforce more than others (especially in the current challenging economic circumstances) – in order that others can be urged to do the same.

Sunday, 5 April 2009

Thinking about Leighanne Levensaler’s post has made me realise I’ve not written on performance management for some time. But I have posted on it several times before. I’ve even countered Bersin’s (and others’) recommendations to kill the performance appraisal:

“And then read Wally Bock's thoughts on abolishing performance reviews at Three Star Leadership. Bock refers to a recent Wall Street Journal article which suggests performance reviews are 'ill-advised and bogus' and should be replaced by 'Two-side, Reciprocally Accountable, Performance previews'. Bock is absolutely right in explaining that it's the ongoing conversation rather than the formal set-pieces which are important, but I think, although I don't agree with ditching performance reviews, that WSJ makes some good points too. However, I'd ditch the rather ugly name, and unfortunate acronym ('TRAP'), and just call this coaching, which I think needs to be part of any performance management system worthy of this name.”

One of the best things I’ve read on performance management recently is a review in People & Strategy (volume 31, issue 3), including a write-up of a discussion with Ed Lawler, about his new book, Talent, held almost a year ago. The discussion group concluded that performance management is the most critical process in managing talent, but is executed poorly, and “actually, the system/process often gets in the way of managing talent.”

Moving on into the Point / Counterpoint article, Marcus Buckingham suggested that:

“The performance system in most organizations is among the least productive and least popular of organizational rituals. It tends to be disappointing to the employees, frustrating to the managers, and nets little productive output for the organization. It is the equivalent, one might say, of a visit to a bad dentist: Before it happens, you don’t look forward to it; while it’s happening, you wish it were over; and when it’s done, you rarely get the outcomes you wanted.”

And Lynda Gratton recalled:

“When Gary Hamel and I asked a group of 20 CEOs at London Business School what was the process that was most broken in their companies, we expected them to talk about production or quality—or even perhaps some manufacturing process. They did not. Almost all said that the process that most irritated and annoyed them was performance management. The emotion in the room was running really high. It was not just that they believed it was broken—they absolutely hated it. They hated the bureaucracy, they hated the form filling, and they hated the ranking.”

Supporting my points about design and engagement in my previous post, the group noted that “the ‘ideal’ system and process still will have to be designed, and accepted”. These are some of the suggestions for improving performance management made within the article:

Cascading goals vertically but probably horizontally as well

Not using a forced distribution

Being based on the organisation’s needs and, where possible, on each employees’ strengths

Being employee driven

Being fast and frequent

Involving the entire community

Being web based

Being unique – not copying another organisation’s process.

Much of this aligns with my own recommendations although these tend to go a little bit further than the above - tending to focus on creating a more innovative, higher value approach I’ve called performance leadership, being based upon dreams rather than objectives, and being MUSICal rather than SMART.

But of course, these are only examples and suggestions. I think the most powerful point emerging from the articles is the need for best fit, and uniqueness, in the approach. I’ve criticised some of Lynda Gratton’s signature processes previously, but I do think she’s right in suggesting that:

“Good practice can be a real spur to action—but great companies also invent their own ‘signature experience’ that sets them apart. By explicitly communicating what makes your firm unique, you can dramatically improve employee engagement and performance.”